FIVE TECH TRENDS FOR 2019

Andreas Cambitsis of BSC looks at five tech trends likely to
be shaping the way we live and work in the coming year.

Autonomous cars

There are 1.3 million road deaths a year, according to the
World Health Organization – mostly caused by human error.1 Autonomous
cars have the potential to be 10 times safer than traditional cars, which can
translate into a million lives saved, every year.

Tesla have made a huge investment into the autonomous
driving space, and its car users are logging millions of miles every year.
Theirs is a fleet that learns, which is also helping to increase knowledge and
machine learning around the technology. The convergence of technology like
electric vehicles, solar power and on-demand services will mean that cars
become cheap to buy, cheap to run and commoditised. As an estimate, instead of a
car being on the road 5% of its life, cars will be shared by several users and
be driving 90% of the time.

Reducing the number of cars on the road will have massive
implication for parking lots, urban planning, and the use of domestic space.
Garages will become an extra room in our houses, once cars become commoditised
and owning one becomes unnecessary. Personal finance, insurance and even organ
donation will be affected, since much of the demand and supply of organs
currently comes from car crashes.

Voice in the
enterprise

Google Home, Siri, Alexa and other virtual assistants are
known in the home space, but the use of such voice technology in the workplace
is set to expand exponentially. Access to information is the killer
application. Voice-activated assistants within organisations will enable
better, more effective collection and sharing of information. An executive on
his way to work will receive a customised, spoken briefing from his digital
assistant daily on what is most relevant to him.

Voice is an excellent way to consume information in the
business. Amazon is already pushing it through their Echo Enterprise technology
as well as other business apps.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems will also be
able to be updated by voice, live. Voice will enable businesses to keep their
data current, and to minimise the friction involved in updating it.

Virtual Reality (VR)

At our business, we have found VR a vastly superior technology
for workplace training. One client found that in one day of VR training, they
achieved more than what they previously did in 10 days of traditional training.
In the USA, Wal-Mart gave the technology a massive vote of confidence with the
purchase of 17 000 Oculus Go headsets for staff training.

The immersive, interactive VR experience also has
application in design, as well as sales and marketing. Property development can
be toured in immersive virtual reality. Likewise, new cars can be road tested
in virtual reality.

Designers, architects, town planners and the like are also
now able to stress test their creations in VR before they ever go into
production.

Humans are visual beings – 30% of our brains are geared to
visual processing. So, anything that can take advantage of that biological
computational power will help to make us more productive.

Digital twinning

Building an identical digital version of a business and its
systems allows business owners to optimise their entire value chain. Amazon
already uses the technology to help meet its commitment to same-day delivery to
its millions of customers.

The convergence of technologies like the Internet of Things,
machine learning and VR is enabling highly accurate digital twinning and giving
companies a better understanding of what process adjustments would work best in
their operations – a critical competitive advantage.

The cloud in South
Africa

The announcement by Microsoft that it will establish data
centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town means South African companies’ adoption
of cloud computing and storage will expand exponentially.

The perceived data-security risks will be fewer, since data
storage will be local, the management will be local, and there will be
significantly lower latency, which will drive massive adoption.

Legacy on-site data-storage systems are often unable to
interface with new technology applications. When a business has their data on
the cloud, it becomes far easier for suppliers to work with that data and to
take advantage of machine learning and other current digital technology.
Broader adoption of cloud technology will allow firms to make better, far more
productive use of their own information.